lørdag den 7. januar 2012

Finally - An update.

There have been rather quiet lately on this blog and it is mainly due to my exam period combined with Christmas and the amount of hours I've been putting into raiding.

However, Christmas has ended, exams done and my shaman has killed Madness of Deathwing on heroic so now I should have a little time to make a post.

How is restoration shaman performing in Dragon Soul, and how much can I whine ?

It is my personal point of view, and despite holy paladins with their "Holy Radiance, Holy Shock, Holy Radiance -> Light of Dawn" playstyle currently dominates every fight if we look at something like www.worldoflogs.com , and yes it is often most beneficial to run with 2 holy paladins, but back on track - restoration shaman. Nonetheless, I must admit that I haven't been progressing on all 8 bosses and I will tell why.

The day the ban ended I had to hand in an exam paper which meant that I was unable to participate in heroic Morchok, Warlord Zon'ozz and at the time I got home they had already started pulling Yor'sahj the Unsleeping. When those were killed I was asked to go on my druid for Hagara, however, Hagara didn't take long and next and exciting boss was Ultraxion.

Ultraxion is a fight which I think is quite fun; allow me to elaborate: When we reached him everyone and that meant including healers had to squeeze out as much damage as possible in the beginning before it became a healing race, which is something I usually do, but I like encounters which "requires" it. So we went with 2 x disc, 2 x holy paladins and me as restoration shaman. We spend the rest of the day on it, but our closest attempt was a 2% wipe. So when we made a few changes / optimizations we killed it at the 3rd pull of the next day.

Next up:Warmaster Blackhorn on which we started with 8 healers, and I was on my druid, however, when we started to have a rhythm and it became obvious that the issue was damage I was replaced and bam - 15 pulls later it was a kill.

I also started on my druid at Spine of Deathwing, however, after several times suggesting that I would be more beneficial on my shaman I was finally allowed to log it instead, and beside a shaman can push almost the same HPS as a druid (I will give the druid that ToL + Tranqulity is might good) then Spirit Link Totem is simply godlike on that fight, however, there is also the aspect that the majority of damage is the "Burst" from Corrupted Bloods and with one shaman you can expect 40-50% uptime on Ancestral Fortitude (10% physical damage reduction), but with 2 you will see +90% which is less damage on the raid, and furthermore Ancestral Vigor which becomes increasingly good the longer we get into the fight due to the minus 6% HP that is triggered and stacks. Furthermore, the waste majority of a shamans healing on Spine will be from Healing Rain, Earthliving, Chain Heal and Healing Stream Totem, and when you get further into the fight and the tanks require more attention you are one of the classes which "looses" least in terms of shifting focus while casting the additional Healing Raid.

This was also one of the reasons why I ended up being dispelbot after our first healer decided to quit, however, this also lead to what I can only describe as retardation beyond recognition. The guy who at the time was "in charge" of the healing aspect of Spine wanted us shamans to spec a spec like this for Spine: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#hhb0hZZcGbMsdsRsd:boM0mczM in order to push as much DPs as possible on Tendons and it is a very cute idea, however, the blistering idiot hadn't bothered to a) ask us (we already had tried a more DPs orientated spec and dismissed it due to it was nerfing us, and would become a huge issue when we would manage to get past the 2nd Tendon) b) He hadn't bothered to look at the logs and c) He didn't understand jack shit about shamans.
Now, let me tell you why this is retarded: In top 3 of our healing spells on Spine you would find Earthliving, which is why it is a mindblowingly stupid idea to remove Elemental Weapons . His idea was with Elemental Precision to make us reforge our spirit down, which is rather stupid on a fight which last for that long since it nerfes your passive regn, the mana that you + your fellow healers gain from Mana Tide and it relies on that you can slap out Lightning Bolts whenever you want to, which you can't and you gain somewhere like 20-30k damage extra on the Tendons, but you nerf yourself around 5000 HPs + - and in addition you remove the possibility that you will have mana beyond Tendon 1½. We tried to argue, but when people aren't willingly to listen to sense it is a lost battle, not that I do not want to try something new, but when it is so obviously stupid it is just a waste of time. So I called him a blistering idiot and specced to http://www.wowhead.com/talent#hhZbhZfGbMsdbRsd , now you might say"Why aren't you picking Ancestral Awakening" and the answer is quite simple since from that data we had from the previous tries AA was around 1% and since I rarely used GHW due to I was dispelling plus Chain Heal would in 87% of the time be a better choice it wasn't a hard choice.

However,with people acting like a bunch of 12 year old girls and the constant bitching from people who were oblivious of the class, but yet still thought they knew everything I decided to take my leave a long with another, whom I also went from my previous guild with, and despite as a healer I was benched for progress due to the commonly known "No one takes a healer if they don't know how he plays" whereas as DPs if your class is good on the fight you are just thrown out in it. So I watched while Spine and Madness achievements popped up, yet I had the joy of killing them the next reset and thereby finishing of Dragon Soul in as a weird way as it had started.